Lighttpd and virtualhosts

Here a quick how to, about how to configure Lighttpd to run with Virtualhosts.
This has been installed and tested on a Raspberry Pi.

apt-get install lighttpd php5 php5-cgi

Enable modules:

lighttpd-enable-mod auth cgi fastcgi fastcgi-php nagios3 simple-vhost ssl status

Content of /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf

server.modules = (
        "mod_access",
        "mod_alias",
        "mod_compress",
        "mod_redirect",
#       "mod_rewrite",
)

server.document-root        = "/var/www"
server.upload-dirs          = ( "/var/cache/lighttpd/uploads" )
server.errorlog             = "/var/log/lighttpd/error.log"
server.pid-file             = "/var/run/lighttpd.pid"
server.username             = "www-data"
server.groupname            = "www-data"
server.port                 = 80


index-file.names            = ( "index.php", "index.html", "index.lighttpd.html" )
url.access-deny             = ( "~", ".inc" )
static-file.exclude-extensions = ( ".php", ".pl", ".fcgi" )

compress.cache-dir          = "/var/cache/lighttpd/compress/"
compress.filetype           = ( "application/javascript", "text/css", "text/html", "text/plain" )

# default listening port for IPv6 falls back to the IPv4 port
include_shell "/usr/share/lighttpd/use-ipv6.pl " + server.port
include_shell "/usr/share/lighttpd/create-mime.assign.pl"
include_shell "/usr/share/lighttpd/include-conf-enabled.pl"

To easily manage virtual hosts, edit /etc/lighttpd/conf-available/10-simple-vhost.conf

server.modules += ( "mod_simple_vhost" )
simple-vhost.server-root = "/var/www/vhost"
simple-vhost.default-host = "error.default.loc"
simple-vhost.document-root = "/"

This configuration above will allow you to manage your virutalhosts simply storing them in a folder under /var/www/vhost
No extra configuration is needed from the server side.
Simply go into /var/www/vhost and create a folder named as the virtualhost you would like to manage.
In this particular case, please make sure to have a folder called error.default.loc with a page inside which will be displayed in case of ANY error.
For example, if you want to manage mysite.example.com, simply do the following:

cd /var/www/vhost
mkdir mysite.example.com
chown www-data:www-data mysite.example.com

…and put the html/php files inside that new folder! 🙂

To test if our webserver works, you can always use curl command as explained here.